Washington — The Justice Department and Trump legal team submitted their lists of possible special master candidates to review the documents seized by the FBI at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in August.
In a joint filing late Friday, prosecutors and Trump’s team each submitted two candidates for the role.
The government recommended two retired federal judges: Barbara Jones, who served in federal district court in Manhattan, and Thomas Griffith, who served on the the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
The former president’s legal team suggested Rayond Dearie, former Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, and Paul Huck, Jr., former Deputy Attorney General for the State of Florida.
The parties said they would respond to the other’s pair of candidates by Monday.
Judge Aileen Cannon ruled Monday that she would name a special master, an independent third party, to undertake the review and ordered the two parties to come up with a list of potential candidates acceptable to both of them.
Cannon also ordered the federal investigators probing whether Trump mishandled classified documents to stop using the seized documents in their criminal probe, pending the review by a special master.
On Thursday, the Justice Department filed notice of its intent to appeal Cannon’s ruling on the special master and also asked her to lift part of the ruling so that investigators could continue reviewing the 103 most sensitive documents seized from Mar-a-Lago that bear classified markings.
Trump and his attorneys have until Monday morning to respond to the Justice Department’s request to resume investigating the documents.
Earlier this week, Cannon sided with Trump’s legal team, finding that the independent review was necessary. She tasked a special master with analyzing “potentially privileged material subject to claims of attorney-client and/or executive privilege.” The ruling did allow the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to continue its examination of potential national security risks posed by the seized records at the same time criminal investigators were barred from accessing them.
But the intelligence community decided to pause its analysis of the documents, citing the “uncertainty” caused by Cannon’s Monday order. According to Thursday’s filing by the Justice Department, the 103 documents with classified markings were already separated from the remaining thousands of seized records.
The Justice Department argued in its notice of appeal that halting its investigation will pose a grave harm to national security, and the intelligence review of the records can’t be executed without the involvement of criminal investigators. The investigation and the public at large, prosecutors wrote, could be “irreparably injured” by the pause.
Trump has alleged in his lawsuit that the Justice Department search warrant that prompted the Aug. 8 Mar-a-Lago search was “overbroad” and that investigators took “presumptively privileged” information. Cannon’s opinion Monday indicated she thought this claim warranted further review.
Investigators have been examining allegations that documents with classified markings were mishandled when they were transferred from Trump’s White House to his Mar-a-Lago residence after the presidential transition in 2021. In three separate instances earlier this year that culminated in the August 8 search, the National Archives and the FBI recovered troves of documents from the Florida resort. They are also probing whether Trump or his team obstructed the investigation by not properly responding to a grand jury subpoena.
